we kept dancing

When my guy friends pal around with me and try to make me part of the group, they expect me to degrade women with them. They expect me to go along with crass jokes and tons of objectification.

When I pass in public, I get handed the check. People look to me for answers even when a woman who’s obviously in charge is right beside me. I can even get caught up in talking over women and forgetting boundaries because I can feel myself being socialized that way.

Further, many of the things people cite as privilege are things that should be afforded everyone. Not being disrespected in public is not a bad thing we should be avoiding or shaming people for experiencing. That's a good thing. Respect is what we're striving for with any gender based activism. In this case equality is more important than equity. That means giving respect to women, rather than taking something away from men to even things out.

The idea that feminism relies on destroying men, masculinity, or manhood because it's inherently violent is radfem rhetoric and the critical basis for TERFs and TIRFs. There is nothing to be gained from taking stuff from men as a punishment for systematic sexism, especially as that frequently targets marginalized men, as those are the only men within the reach of women's systemic power. Or people that aren't even men (trans women, nb people, intersex folks) in the name of "fighting the good fight against men" because otherwise they wouldn't be satisfied by getting to actually enact the full spectrum of violent oppression that happens against women against another person.

And dismantling radfem ideology is actually really important and illustrates the points of OP well, because many trans men exposed to feminism tend to feel like they take up too much space in many scenarios that have a primary underlying problem of women not feeling able to speak, rather than anything they've personally done. Rather, the kind of speaking is important- active listening, endorsing points that were used to make his own point, opening up the floor for women, pointing out women who got looked over, etc- rather than pressuring a trans man to simply speak less and less until he doesn't feel comfortable speaking in the space at all.

This has collectively led to many trans men, when confronted with the idea of transmisandry, to say it's "not that bad." They could be dealing with a lot of shit specific to being a trans man rather than just being trans that's impossible to understand through the lens of transphobia only, but it's not "what trans women go through" so it's not important. Nevermind that every marginalized group deserves its own community language to understand how oppression impacts them in particular.

this blog has had a great run and I love what I've made here—but I've been thinking about a clean fresh start and I think I need one. feel free to unfollow me here and follow me @tenderwiki. if we were mutuals I'll follow you back.

Your argument doesn’t even hold up. You think this is about former Gifted kids being sad now because they’re not being treated like they were in elementary school, which was presumably better.

But the post was, “It’s common for Gifted children to experience deep psychological pain in elementary school.” As in, a lot of Gifted kids didn’t experience being held up as an example and praised a bunch as actually, you know… positive.

It’s not like you do anything to earn having a high IQ, any more than you earn being tall or having good eyesight. It’s just something that happens to you as you grow up. Sure, you might be able to reach things on high shelves, but you also smack your head into doorways. And from personal experience? When a teacher points you out as the only person in your grade 2 class to score perfectly on a test, fucking nobody wants to play with you at recess after.

Often growing up Gifted is just like childhood with any other neurodivergence—having social and emotional issues the people around you need to be experts to even realize you’re having trouble, much less know how to help you. A four-year-old’s parents don’t usually have to watch for “I just realized that everyone I love will inevitably die and I can’t reliably self-soothe myself when we drive away from Grandma’s, so I have NO emotional coping tools for this” meltdowns.

Oh, except there’s one difference: A lot of adults think that being intellectually smart means you will never have social problems, emotional problems, learning disabilities, or mental illnesses. So adults will literally actually say, “They’re a smart kid, they’ll figure it out” when the problem is… every other six-year-old hating you and you don’t know what you did.

Even small amounts can make a huge difference!

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I would imagine that the asexual relationship to gender is colored by the same kind of alienation and exclusion that colored the lesbian relationship to gender in decades past. asexual and aromantic people are decentered not only by the cisheteropatriarchy but also by the lgbt community, which values interpersonal relationships, romantic bonds, and community. 

as aromantic and asexual people are marginalized over and over again, removed from social frameworks by their inability to be sexual or to be romantic, so too are they alienated from the base of identity - gender - resulting in a deep-seated feeling of loss, homelessness, and depersonalization (reflected in identities like voidpunk). further layers of violent personal anguish are added when the asexual or aromantic is trans or nonbinary, a person of color, autistic, or a survivor. 

this anguish is not the result of a flaw in the person but flaws in society that alienate people who are perceived as lacking essential human traits; hunger, or desire for sex or romance. 

additionally, many aromantics and aromantic asexuals displace meaning from romantic and/or sexual interpersonal bonds to platonic interpersonal bonds, and are further alienated when their community fails to see and account for the importance of platonic relationships to the aromantic and aromantic asexual person. this leaves the aromantic and aromantic asexual person feeling misunderstood or lost, without a place or people who care about and account for their needs. 

to deal with the lack of understanding that surrounds their identities, aromantics and aromantic asexuals have coined words like “queerplatonic” to refer to their relationships. sadly, there is little data on aromantics and asexuals and even less on their relationships to other facets of their identity. 

OH MY GOD SO

The archetypal example of a stolen resource is like: A homosexual youth gets thrown out of their parents’ house for being gay, and tries to go to a LGBTQ+ shelter. The shelter turns them away, because the space that youth might have taken is being occupied by an asexual who surely isn’t “really” oppressed.

*DRAGS HANDS DOWN FACE*

As I may have mentioned once or twice, I have worked for human resource nonprofits, like shelters and so forth. And the thing people don’t get is: A shelter at high capacity is good. If you care about a population and want them to have resources, you want to use those resources as much as possible.

Do you know the worst thing for a shelter?

Empty beds.

Shelters are generally funded, in large part, by outside sources–charitable foundations, government agencies, et cetera. They receive their funding by saying, “We have the capacity to serve 600 people a year, and in fact, we served 635! Please continue to fund us at this level because we are clearly serving a valuable purpose.”

Every shelter I’ve worked at keeps meticulous records of everyone they turned away. Because those are worth their weight in gold.

The better thing is to say, “We served 600 people this year, and we had to turn another 600 people away because we didn’t have room for them.” Because as much as it sucks to be the person turned away? This means funding bodies are more likely to say, “You know what, you’re right. We are going to give you a grant to build a second facility, and then increase your funding in the future so you can serve twice as many people.”

You will NEVER get that second shelter if it isn’t proved that people need that space but aren’t getting it. I know that being rejected is a really fundamental trauma for a lot of us, but in the broad scheme of human services, we are competing with a lot of OTHER groups that are struggling for resources, and they’re all at max capacity too.

(There actually isn’t an LGBTQ+ shelter within a thousand kilometres of me, because there just aren’t enough of us on the prairies to justify the expense. So yes, this is a bit hypothetical to me because yeah, imagine getting resources. But I’m extrapolating from what I know.)

It is the job of shelter workers to decide how to apportion resources and make sure the people who need them most get them first. When you work in a shelter, you get very good, very fast, at turning some people down because other people’s needs are more pressing. And it is better for the LGBTQ+ community at large to have someone reach out for resources that other people need more, and be turned down, than to have them quietly decide ahead of time that they don’t “deserve” those resources and never ask at all. If they asked, then you can say, “Look at all the people who asked for help, who we don’t have the resources to assist!” 

If they didn’t ask, your funding bodies will say, “There’s no demand for this kind of service, so why should we waste our money on something nobody wants?”

my friend was recently beaten by her mother for being caught with her girlfriend. she sent me a photo of her face. i won’t post it but it was incredibly upsetting. 

she is sleeping in her gfs car, in this brutal winter. it is incredibly incredibly dangerous. people die in this weather. 

please donate to her directly:  paypal.me/alexziaCS